Massive early galaxies defy “prior understanding of the universe”

_{Denyse O'Leary

February 24, 2023

Cosmology, Philosophy, Science}

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At ScienceDaily:

Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe.
“These objects are way more massive? than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.” – Penn State (February 23, 2023)

Tip: If all you want is to have your prior beliefs about the universe confirmed, don’t whack a huge telescope into space and code it to send back real-life actual data. Pound lecterns on behalf of manipulated interpretations of prior data instead.

The paper is open access.

Comments

@Relatd #75 You might want to brush up on your physics. Cosmic rays do not have mass. Even then, some things with mass can exceed that speed limit because the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. However, that's not the same as something with mass traveling though actual space at faster than the speed of light, which is what Einstein was referring to. But that's irrelevant to my point. Neutrinos has mass. And in every other experiment we've performed, neutrinos did not exceed the speed of light. So, why didn't those observations in the OPERA experiment immediately invalidate Einstein's speed limit? Because we didn't have a good explanation as to why neutrinos were "observed" traveling faster than speed of light in the OPERA experiment, but not every other experiment designed to determine the speed of neutrinos. Observations are theory laden.critical rationalist_{March 6, 2023
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@BA77
Specially, the paper refers to the question of whether biological replicators perform replication so accurately that their design had to be already present, at the outset, in the laws of physics.

While not directly targeting at ID, would you agree that if the design of replicators need not be present in the laws of physics, at the outset, then they wouldn’t need to be present in some designer at the outset, either?
[Crickets] If it's true that constructor theory is meaningless, then it shouldn't be capable of formulating this question in terms of possible an impossible physical tasks. Specifically, in regards to the appearance of design, what is physically necessary for replicators to, well, replicate, a network of construction tasks, etc. So, if you actually have any confidence in your claim, why not answer my questions? In fact, it seems to me you would already have an answer to my question, if you're confident. IOW, wouldn't an having an answer, one way or the other, be a necessary consequence of your claim? Why are you afraid of trying to poke holes in your own claim?critical rationalist_{March 6, 2023
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"It’s odd how BA describes constructor theory as being useless, despite actual papers that target questions about biology. Specifically, the supposed necessity of the existence of the design of replicators in the laws of physics," Tell you what CR, you guys make some unique predictions from your 'theory', do some experiments to validate those unique predictions, and thus validate Constructor theory to over 5 sigma level, (which is the minimum level required to be achieved for a new theory to be considered valid), then get back to me with your experimental proof. Until then, I regard constructor theory as nothing more than a delusion arising from the fevered imagination of David Deutsch who, last time I checked, (and simply in order to avoid God), believes he is endlessly splitting into a veritable infinity of new David Deutschs every time an electron and/or photon is simply measured.
Too many worlds - Philip Ball - Feb. 17, 2015 Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way. That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe.,,, http://aeon.co/magazine/science/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy/ Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God - Michael Egnor - August 2, 2017 Excerpt: as I noted, the issue here isn’t physics or even logic. The issue is psychiatric. We have a highly accomplished physicist, who regards the existence of God as preposterous, asserting that the unceasing creation of infinite numbers of new universes by every atom in the cosmos at every moment is actually happening (as we speak!), and that it is a perfectly rational and sane inference. People have been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for less. Now of course Carroll isn’t crazy, not in any medical way. He’s merely given his assent to a crazy ideology — atheist materialism —,,, What can we in the reality-based community do when an ideology — the ideology that is currently dominant in science — is not merely wrong, but delusional? I guess calling it what it is is a place to start. https://evolutionnews.org/2017/08/atheist-physicist-sean-carroll-an-infinite-number-of-universes-is-more-plausible-than-god/ A Hand-Waving Exact Science - Sheldon Glashow Excerpt: Arthur Fine: There is, I think, no sense at all to be made of the splitting of worlds.3 John Bell: The many worlds interpretation seems to me an extravagant, and above all an extravagantly vague hypothesis.4 Murray Gell-Mann: Everett’s ideology that there are many worlds that are equally real is operationally meaningless.5 Steven Weinberg: I find the many worlds interpretation repellent.6 http://inference-review.com/article/a-hand-waving-exact-science A Critique of the Many Worlds Interpretation - (Inspiring Philosophy - 2014) - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_42skzOHjtA&list=PL1mr9ZTZb3TViAqtowpvZy5PZpn-MoSK_&index=7
Verse:
2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
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CR at 70, "The 2011 OPERA experiment “observed” neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light didn’t immediately falsify Einstein’s speed of light. Why? Because we didn’t have a good explanation as to why neutrinos only traveled faster than light in the OPRA experiment, but not any other. Later we explained this with a loose networking cable and a timer that was out of calibration." Then explain Cosmic Rays traveling faster than light. "Cosmic rays, which are ultra-high energy particles originating from all over the Universe, strike... [+] The fast-moving charged particles also emit light due to Cherenkov radiation as they move faster than the speed of light in Earth's atmosphere, and produce secondary particles that can be detected here on Earth."relatd_{March 5, 2023
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CR @71, @65 If a position does not make truth claims, then it makes no claims at all. So, here is my question: What does fallibilism claim to be true? And what is it based on? Some specific questions, based on the article on fallibilism that you linked to: Is it certain that “nothing can infallibly tell you what is infallible, nor what is probable”? Is it certain that ”a fallibilist cannot claim to be infallible even about fallibilism itself”? Is it certain that it makes no difference “whether the idea was originally suggested to you by a passing hobo or a physicist”? If one of the claims (from the article) above is certain. What is the certainty based on?Origenes_{March 5, 2023
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No one can explain Constructor theory. Marletto certainly can’t. Until the time when someone can explain it, we will have assume it’s nonsense. Sorry, no links. In your own words. Links have been gobbledygook. Deutsch’s own words have been nonsense. My guess, is you cannot.
While not directly targeting at ID, would you agree that if the design of replicators need not be present in the laws of physics, at the outset, then they wouldn’t need to be present in some designer at the outset, either?
This is saying that any potential designer can have no thought process that would lead to a specific design. But yet that is not our experience through out history. Every time an intelligence intervenes in nature, this action is not a subset of the laws of physics. Yet, the capacity was there before the action. Such processes intervene in nature to produce something that nature by itself could never produce. And to something the designer didn’t originally contemplate. Why should anyone read what you are saying? So far I haven’t found anything that isn’t nonsense. Take your best shot at something that is relevant and true. Just one.jerry_{March 5, 2023
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@BA77 Why don't you start with the paper on the Constructor theory of life: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0681.pdf Specially, the paper refers to the question of whether biological replicators perform replication so accurately that their design had to be already present, at the outset, in the laws of physics.
In the biosphere self-reproduction is approximated to various accuracies. There are many poor approximations to self-reproducers - e.g., crude repli- cators such as crystals, short RNA strands and autocatalytic cycles involved in the origin of life [11]. Being so inaccurate, they do not require any further explanation under no-design laws: they do not have appearance of design, any more than simple inorganic catalysts do.(4) In contrast, actual gene-replication is an impressively accurate physical transformation, albeit imperfect. But even more striking is that living cells can self-reproduce to high accuracy in a variety of environments, reconstruct- ing the vehicle afresh, under the control of the genes, in all the intricate details necessary for gene replication. This is prima facie problematic under no-design laws: how can those processes be so accurate, without their design being encoded in the laws of physics? This is why some physicists - notably, Wigner and Bohm, [12], [13] - have even claimed that accurate self-reproduction of an organism with the appearance of design requires the laws of motion to be “tailored” for the purpose – i.e., they must contain its design [12].
While not directly targeting at ID, would you agree that if the design of replicators need not be present in the laws of physics, at the outset, then they wouldn't need to be present in some designer at the outset, either? But I don't want to leave anyone out. This question is open to everyone, not just BA77.critical rationalist_{March 5, 2023
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#69 Origenes, what certainly are you referring to? This this article on fallibilism: https://nautil.us/why-its-good-to-be-wrong-234374/.critical rationalist_{March 5, 2023
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One perspective referenced multiple times by Anderson is a “reductionist perspective” and predictions. But this is precisely the problem with the current conception of physics, as it excludes aspects that have no room in the current conception. This is one of the motivations of constructor theory. It’s odd how BA describes constructor theory as being useless, despite actual papers that target questions about biology. Specifically, the supposed necessity of the existence of the design of replicators in the laws of physics, etc. Yet, I haven’t seen BA address the papers themselves. Given that those links were broken, I’ve posted updated links that work. So, this is in your court, BA. As for Anderson’s three points… 01. Probability theory / statistical mechanics First, see this criticism of the probability calculus: Physics Without Probability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc The role of probability is criticized in each of these fields. * Theory of experimental error * Actual science * Biology (Evolution by random variation and natural selection) * Foundations of (classical and quantum) statistical mechanic (principle of equal a priori probability). * Brownian motion * Quantum theory (Born rule) * General decision theory * Information theory (Classical, then quantum) * "Bayesian" philosophy of science (aims to increase credences which are supposedly probabilities) * Pricing of derivative securities (Black-Scholes equation etc. Second, Anderson on thermodynamics…..
One of the problems I see with constructor theory attempts to “redesign” thermodynamics is that statistical physicists have already done this. The “laws” of thermodynamics are two centuries old, and everyone knows what the problems with them are. Fluctuation theorems, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and Markov processes predate the constructor theory. So, nobody working in the field needs a new theory to fix problems that have already been fixed and would be unlikely to want to replace common mathematical tools with unfamiliar terminology.?
And…
Constructor theorists argue that statistical mechanics is vague about what constitutes a “macroscopic scale” but that isn’t really true. While classical statistical theories are subject to the law of large numbers, meaning that they get more accurate the more atoms or molecules you have, more recent statistical mechanical theories have focused on state transitions for arbitrary numbers of molecules. A state transition is, of course, much like a constructor task but has a more definite relationship to dynamics in a probabilistic form. These theories have enabled the study of very small statistical systems composed of only handfuls of molecules. Notions common in classical statistical mechanics like “equilibrium” vanish at these scales of course. These ideas are a lot like constructor theory but were invented much earlier.
Thermodynamics is already somewhat constructor theoretic, as it refers to principles. CT is a more formalized approach. From this paper on thermodynamics: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/ac70a7/meta
Microscopic dynamical laws are time-reversal symmetric. Hence the second law of thermodynamics, intended as mandating the irreversibility of certain dynamical trajectories, is ruled out at the microscopic scale. This tension is usually tackled with statistical mechanics: Boltzmann's and Gibbs' ensemble theories, [1], and their quantum-mechanical generalizations in the hotly investigated area of quantum thermodynamics [2–4]. These powerful methodologies derive the second law from classical or quantum reversible dynamics supplemented with additional assumptions. Despite their tremendous success in many regimes, these schemes have problems at their foundations. First, some such schemes traditionally rely on approximations such as ensembles and coarse-graining, which make the ensuing second laws scale-dependent, [1], and only applicable at a certain macroscopic scale, which is never exactly defined. Examples of scale-dependent laws are those about ferromagnetic phase transitions, which become exact only in the thermodynamic limit (and are not even intended to be exact for realistic systems). I shall designate as 'scale-independent' any law whose applicability to a system does not depend on the system's scale. Most fundamental laws are scale-independent, e.g. conservation laws or Einstein's equations. Furthermore, some formulations of the second law are tied to a particular class of dynamical laws: for instance, quantum thermodynamics is formulated within quantum theory. Hence, they are less general than traditional thermodynamics, which consists of a set of meta-laws largely independent of the details of the dynamical laws they constrain. I shall call laws which can be expressed without reference to the details of any particular dynamics, 'dynamics-independent'. 1 The power of dynamics-independent principles has long been known in fundamental physics. They can be used in lieu of specific dynamical laws, for instance when solving the dynamical equations is an intractable problem—e.g., to study the behaviour of a complex system. They can also be used to make predictions when known laws of motion may not apply to a given regime: e.g. consider Bekenstein's derivation of black hole entropy formula, [5]; and the Bondi-Wheeler's derivation of redshift from conservation of energy, [6, 7], where thermodynamics principles are used instead of a particular theory of coupled matter and gravity. In this paper, I propose a new information-theoretic characterization of work, based on distinguishability, which is independent of scale (hence it refers to no particular length or time or complexity) and of dynamics (i.e. refers to no particular equations of motion). The aim here is to conjecture a new definition of work, which must be formulated independently of particular dynamical formalisms. I shall however use examples from classical and quantum theory to illustrate the concepts I shall introduce. This result expands the reach of current approaches to thermodynamics, putting them on more general and secure foundations. Such advancement is also useful to employ thermodynamics principles to conjecture future laws of motion that will supersede current ones. The key result will be obtained by relying on a set of general principles (which I will discuss in detail later), some of which are part of the recently proposed constructor theory of information […] This work provides the foundation for formulating thermodynamics in an information-theoretic, dynamics-independent and scale-independent way: hence, it can inform new experimental schemes to test this proposed scale- and dynamics-independent reformulation of the second law, see e.g. [15]. It is also a first step towards a theory of programmable constructors in quantum theory, which will generalize the theory of quantum computation to general tasks, in a way already envisaged in von Neumann' theory of the universal constructor [30]. The full development of this theory will require one to merge the theory of classical and quantum computation with thermodynamics, in a dynamics-and scale-independent way.
It’s unclear how this isn’t novel or useful. 02. Physics is mainly useful in as far as it can make predictions
Constructor theory, so far, has not yielded much predictive ability. That may change as more work is done, but it is hard to figure out exactly how it would then differ from ordinary physics.

Yet, suppose I want to predict something that is not easily reductionist, like how a bacterium or a mouse will behave. Would constructor theory give me that power? I wouldn’t think so.
?Which is a “Shut up an calculate.”, instrumentalist view of science. This objection, among others, is addressed in The Philosophy of Constructor Theory: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7439
Causation is widely regarded by philosophers as being at best a useful fiction having no possible role in fundamental science. Hume (1739) argued that we cannot observe causation and therefore can never have evidence of its existence. But here I shall, with Popper (1959, 1963), regard scientific theories as conjectured explanations, not as inferences from evidence, and observation not as a means of validating them, but only of testing them. So Hume’s argument does not apply. Nor does the argument (e.g. by Russell 1913) that the fundamental laws of physics make no reference to causes – for that is merely an attribute of a particular way of formulating those laws (namely, the prevailing conception) not of the laws themselves. Moreover, the prevailing conception itself is not consistent about that issue, for the idea of a universal law is part of it too, and the empirical content of such a law is in what it forbids by way of testable outcomes (Popper 1959, §31 & §35) – in other words in what transformations it denies can be caused to happen, including to measuring instruments in any possible laboratories. Explanatory theories with such counter-factual implications are more fundamental than predictions of what will happen. For example, consider the difference between saying that a purported perpetual motion machine cannot be made to work as claimed ‘because that would violate a conservation law’ and that it won’t work ‘because that axle exerts too small a torque on the wheel’. Both explanations are true, but the former rules out much more, and an inventor who understood only the latter might waste much more time trying to cause the transformation in question by modifying the machine.

But this supposed deficiency is shared by all scientific theories: Tests always depend on background knowledge – assumptions about other laws and about how measuring instruments work (Popper 1963, ch. 10 §4). Logically, should any theory fail a test, one always has the option of retaining it by denying one of those assumptions. Indeed, this has been used as a critique of the very idea of testability (Putnam 1974). But scientific theories are not merely predictions. They are, primarily, explanations: claims about what is there in the physical world and how it behaves. And the negation of an explanation is not an explanation; so a claim such as ‘there could be an undetected particle carrying off the energy’ is not a scientific theory. Nor is ‘perhaps energy is not conserved’. Those are research proposals, not explanations. Consequently the methodology of science includes the rule that any proposal to modify a background-knowledge assumption must itself be a good explanation1. So, the only explanatory implication of Pauli’s suggestion had been to save the principle of the conservation of energy, both would have been abandoned (as the principle of parity invariance was abandoned as a result of other experiments on beta decay). In the event, it was soon used to account for other observations and became indispensable in the understanding of nuclear phenomena, while no good explanation contradicting energy conservation was found.
The 2011 OPERA experiment "observed" neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light didn't immediately falsify Einstein's speed of light. Why? Because we didn't have a good explanation as to why neutrinos only traveled faster than light in the OPRA experiment, but not any other. Later we explained this with a loose networking cable and a timer that was out of calibration. 03. Constructor theory does not solve the problems it claims to solve
?Despite claims that it solves a number of problems in physics such as the connection between quantum and classical systems (hybrid systems) and irreversibility in thermodynamics, it isn’t clear that it solves any of these problems better than reductionist solutions that are more specific to those subfields.
This ignores the advance of having solutions that are not specific to those subfields. It’s a unification. For example, see the above regarding programmable universal constructors. Again, reductionist solutions are limited by being, well, reductionist. That’s the problem. That the current conception of physics has been successful in solving reductionist problems is non-controversial. The motivation of constructor theory is to expand our ability to bring things like information into fundamental physics.
Constructors appear under various names in physics and other fields. For instance, in thermodynamics, a heat engine is a constructor because of the condition that it be capable of ‘operating in a cycle’. But they do not currently appear in laws of physics. Indeed, there is no possible role for them in what I shall call the prevailing conception of fundamental physics, which is roughly as follows: everything physical is composed of elementary constituents such as particles, fields and spacetime; there is an initial state of those constituents; and laws of motion determine how the state evolves continuously thereafter. In contrast, a construction (1) is characterised only by its inputs and outputs, and involves subsystems (the constructor and the substrate), playing different roles, and most constructors are themselves composite objects. So, in the prevailing conception, no law of physics could possibly mention them: the whole continuous process of interaction between constructor and substrate is already determined by the universal laws governing their constituents. However, the constructor theory that I shall propose in this paper is not primarily the theory of constructions or constructors, as the prevailing conception would require it to be. It is the theory of which transformations can be caused and which cannot, and why.
Specially, it would reflect a more fundamental theory that is deeper than all existing theories, including QM and GR. How is this trivial or useless?
The theory of relativity is the theory of the arena (spacetime) in which all physical processes take place. Thus, by its explanatory structure, it claims to underlie all other scientific theories, known and unknown, in that requires them to be expressible in terms of tensor fields on spacetime, and constrains what they can say about the motion of those fields. For example, any theory postulating a new particle that was unaffected by gravity (i.e. by the curvature of spacetime) would contradict the general theory of relativity. Another theory that inherently claims to underlie all others is quantum theory, which requires all observable quantities to be expressible in terms of quantum-mechanical operators obeying certain commutation laws. And so, for example, no theory claiming that some physical variable and its time derivative are simultaneously measurable with arbitrary accuracy can be consistent with quantum theory. Constructor theory would, in this sense, underlie all other theories including relativity and quantum theory. The logic of the relationship would be as follows: Other theories specify what substrates and tasks exist, and provide the multiplication tables for serial and parallel composition of tasks, and state that some of the tasks are impossible, and explain why. Constructor theory provides a unifying formalism in which other theories can do this, and its principles constrain their laws, and in particular, require certain types of task to be possible. I shall call all scientific theories other than constructor theory subsidiary theories.

For example, given a set of laws of motion, what exactly is implied about the initial state by the practical feasibility of building (good approximations to) a universal computer several billion years later may be inelegant and intractably complex to state explicitly, yet may follow logically from elegant constructor-theoretic laws about information and computation.
Anderson’s lack of interest in achieving this doesn’t make constructor theory utterly useless. Again, see the paper on the constructor theory of life, which asks a very specific and relevant question in regards to ID. See post 51, in context to point 10.critical rationalist_{March 5, 2023
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CR@
In case this isn’t clear, given the observations of the experiment, we would assume that something was tampering with Tommy’s box, the cupcake, our neurons, etc., rather than conclude that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4. This is because the explanation that 2+2 actually equals 4, in reality, is extremely hard to vary. Nor can we think of a better explanation as to why 2+2=4.
Are you sure that "we would assume that something was tampering with Tommy’s box, the cupcake, our neurons, etc., rather than conclude that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4"? Are you sure that "the explanation that 2+2 actually equals 4, in reality, is extremely hard to vary"? And are you sure that it is not the case that "we can of a better explanation as to why 2+2=4"? If so, what is your certainty based on? My general question is: what makes criticism valid in fallibilism? What is it based on?Origenes_{March 5, 2023
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Besides Constructor theory being a superfluous theory that doesn't accomplish anything new, David Deutsch, the main originator of constructor theory, is also an avid proponent of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory.
Constructor theory might be revolutionary but what can you do with it? – Tim Andersen, Ph.D – 2021 Excerpt: In 2012, Oxford professor David Deutsch, famous for his championing of quantum information theory and the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, introduced Constructor Theory with the intent of tearing down Newton’s hegemony.,,, 1 Physics already has ways to reconcile dynamics with possibility,, It’s called probability theory or, more specifically, statistical mechanics.,,, 2 Physics is mainly useful in as far as it can make predictions,, Constructor theory, so far, has not yielded much predictive ability.,,, 3 Constructor theory does not solve the problems it claims to solve Despite claims that it solves a number of problems in physics such as the connection between quantum and classical systems (hybrid systems) and irreversibility in thermodynamics, it isn’t clear that it solves any of these problems better than reductionist solutions that are more specific to those subfields.,, https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe/constructor-theory-may-not-be-the-science-revolution-it-claims-to-be-347ac51311e Tim Andersen, Ph.D. – Principal Research Scientist at Georgia Tech.
To call Everett's Many Worlds interpretation absurd, even delusional, is an understatement.
Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God - Michael Egnor - August 2, 2017 Excerpt: as I noted, the issue here isn’t physics or even logic. The issue is psychiatric. We have a highly accomplished physicist, who regards the existence of God as preposterous, asserting that the unceasing creation of infinite numbers of new universes by every atom in the cosmos at every moment is actually happening (as we speak!), and that it is a perfectly rational and sane inference. People have been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for less. Now of course Carroll isn’t crazy, not in any medical way. He’s merely given his assent to a crazy ideology — atheist materialism —,,, What can we in the reality-based community do when an ideology — the ideology that is currently dominant in science — is not merely wrong, but delusional? I guess calling it what it is is a place to start. https://evolutionnews.org/2017/08/atheist-physicist-sean-carroll-an-infinite-number-of-universes-is-more-plausible-than-god/ Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems - Philip Ball - May 2018 Excerpt: Every scientific theory (at least, I cannot think of an exception) is a formulation for explaining why things in the world are the way we perceive them to be. This assumption that a theory must recover our perceived reality is generally so obvious that it is unspoken.,, But the MWI refuses to grant it. Sure, it claims to explain why it looks as though “you” are here observing that the electron spin is up, not down. But actually it is not returning us to this fundamental ground truth at all. Properly conceived, it is saying that there are neither facts nor a you who observes them. It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable. Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/
Moreover, Everett's primary motivation for postulating the patent absurdity of MWI was based on his a priori commitment to atheism, and. was not based on any empirical observation, nor compelling logic, that would have warranted him to postulate such an extravagant absurdity as Many Worlds. And Deutsch avidly champions Many Worlds precisely because it is atheistic in its philosophy. and not because of "the elegance of his mathematical model,"
The Atheist War Against Quantum Mechanics - Nov 28, 2021 Excerpt: A dyed-in the-wool nihilist, Everett is known for ordering that his ashes be dumped into a trashcan when he died—a practice that Everett’s daughter later copied upon committing suicide. Everett brought this same dedication to bear in his scientific career. Today, Everett’s disciples praise him for bringing an atheistic scorn of the immaterial back to quantum mechanics. As a graduate student in the 1950s, Everett was alarmed to discover that traditional quantum mechanics did not line up with his materialist commitments. He was repulsed by the fact that the human mind seemed to be given a special role—a conclusion that Everett thought smacked of the supernatural. There seemed to be “a magic process in which something quite drastic occurred, while in all other times systems were assumed to obey perfectly natural continuous laws.”[4] In Jonathan Allday’s words, Everett firmly believed that such a “‘magic process’… should not be considered in quantum physics.” Everett therefore devised the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics—perhaps the most widely-known interpretation in contemporary popular culture. The purpose of the interpretation was, in essence, to create a consistent model of quantum mechanics that would preserve Thomas Huxley’s materialistic dismissal of the mind. Everett’s model continues to be extremely influential. David Deutsch, a militantly atheistic contemporary physicist, regards himself as a sort of apostle of Hugh Everett. “Everett was before his time,” says Deutsch. Before Everett, “things were regarded as progress which are not explanatory, and the vacuum was filled by mysticism and religion and every kind of rubbish. Everett is important because he stood out against it.”[5] Deutsch’s words of praise are important: Everett’s greatest achievement is not the elegance of his mathematical model, but that the fact that his model pushed back against “religion,” which is of course false. https://www.staseos.net/post/the-atheist-war-against-quantum-mechanics
Lastly, as far as empirical science itself is concerned, MWI is now experimentally shown to be false. Specifically, In the atheist’s many worlds model, the collapse of the wave function is simply denied as being a real effect. As wikipedia states, in many worlds “there is no wave function collapse.”
Many-worlds interpretation Excerpt: The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse.[2] – per wikipedia Quantum mechanics – Philosophical implications Excerpt: Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a multiverse composed of mostly independent parallel universes.[52] This is a consequence of removing the axiom of the collapse of the wave packet. – per wikipedia
Yet, directly contrary to what atheist’s hold to be true in their many worlds model, the collapse of the wave function is now experimentally shown to be a real effect. As the following experiment found, “homodyne measurements, show,, the non-local collapse of a particle’s wave function.,” and, “the collapse of the wave function is a real effect”, and, “”Through these different measurements, you see the wave function collapse in different ways, thus proving its existence and showing that Einstein was wrong.”
Quantum experiment verifies Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ – March 24, 2015 Excerpt: An experiment,, has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein’s original conception of “spooky action at a distance” using a single particle. ,,Professor Howard Wiseman and his experimental collaborators,, report their use of homodyne measurements to show what Einstein did not believe to be real, namely the non-local collapse of a (single) particle’s wave function.,, According to quantum mechanics, a single particle can be described by a wave function that spreads over arbitrarily large distances,,, ,, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists have used homodyne detectors—which measure wave-like properties—to show the collapse of the wave function is a real effect,, This phenomenon is explained in quantum theory,, the instantaneous non-local, (i.e. beyond space and time), collapse of the wave function to wherever the particle is detected.,,, “Einstein never accepted orthodox quantum mechanics and the original basis of his contention was this single-particle argument. This is why it is important to demonstrate non-local wave function collapse with a single particle,” says Professor Wiseman. “Einstein’s view was that the detection of the particle only ever at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only ever at one point, without invoking the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to nothing at all other points. “However, rather than simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we used homodyne measurements enabling one party to make different measurements and the other, using quantum tomography, to test the effect of those choices.” “Through these different measurements, you see the wave function collapse in different ways, thus proving its existence and showing that Einstein was wrong.” http://phys.org/news/2015-03-quantum-einstein-spooky-action-distance.html
In short, (and much like Darwinists), whatever MWI proponents such as Deutsch are doing, they certainly are NOT doing empirical science. i.e. MWI is experimentally shown to be false! And that falsification of MWI, for all intents and purposes, renders anything else Deutsch may have to say about Quantum Mechanics worthless. Verse:
1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast to that which is good.
bornagain77_{March 5, 2023
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The analogy between the theory of evolution and the 2+2 theory is in fact closer than the mere difficulty of imagining a good explanation to the contrary
Someone presents gobbledygook and in a straight face pretends it is truth. This quote alone should disqualify Deutsch as nothing but a clown and anything but a serious scientists. He compares a definition, yes 2 + 2 is a definition within a logic framework, with a supposition as to how some physical event took place. The physical event is the appearance of various live entities in the past. The latter requires a mechanism using the physical laws and exists in the real world. The former exists in the mental world of logic which requires a mind to observe. They are two extremely incomparable things. Aside: A favorite t-shirt of mine has the expression “2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2.” I use it to mock those who actually believe that 2+2 is not equal to 4 as they redefine just what a number is. We have those believers here. Aside2: we constantly use mental ideas such as mathematics to make sense of the real world where the laws of physics operate. That does not make any mental concept such as Darwinian Evolution also useful because one believes it reveals the real world. The mental thought might help one to investigate the real world. But never in a second believe because one can think of something , does it make it the real world or even a potential real world. Aside3: Chiara Marletto is an extremely beautiful young woman. Aside4: Chiara Marletto does a fantastic job of describing how complicated life is.jerry_{March 5, 2023
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And the paper on bringing information into fundamental physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563critical rationalist_{March 4, 2023
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What does fallibilism say about self-evident truths such as A=A, 2+2=4, error exists, truth exists, I exist?
Perhaps an example discussion on the Fabric of Reality list would help to clarify this…. The question asked was if is 2+2=4 falsifiable. Someone proposed the following test.
If Tommy has two cupcakes in a box and then Tommy puts two more cupcakes in a box and Tommy doesn’t now have 4 cupcakes in a box then the idea has been proven false.
David Deutsch, the Oxford Physicist and author whom’s work the list is based on, pointed out the the problem with this conclusion.
The thing is, if carried out under the conditions implied, the outcome would not refute the theory that 2+2=4 but rather, it would refute the theory that the Tommy-cupcake-box system accurately models the numbers 2 and 4 and the operation of addition. This is exactly analogous to why, as I argued, [a single] fossil rabbit in the Jurassic stratum would not refute the theory of evolution: experimental testing is useless in the absence of a good explanation. What would a good explanation that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4 look like? I can’t think of one; that’s because the theory that it’s true is, in real life, extremely hard to vary. That’s why mathematicians mistake it for being self-evident, or directly intuited, etc. And it is of course my opinion that 2+2 does in fact equal 4, so I’m not expecting to find a contrary theory that is at all good as an explanation. But, for instance, Greg Egan’s science-fiction story Dark Integers explores essentially that possibility (albeit only for very large integers). The analogy between the theory of evolution and the 2+2 theory is in fact closer than the mere difficulty of imagining a good explanation to the contrary. Both of them, if false, would seem to involve there being laws of physics that directly mess with the creation of knowledge, in what we would consider a malevolent way. This makes for very bad explanations, but that doesn’t affect the logic of the issue so here goes: The analogue of creationism being true, then, would be something like that there is really no such entity as the number 4 because the axioms of arithmetic as we know them are blatantly inconsistent, and that the laws of physics act on neurons to make us unconsciously confabulate excuses for ignoring the physical effects of that.
In case this isn’t clear, given the observations of the experiment, we would assume that something was tampering with Tommy’s box, the cupcake, our neurons, etc., rather than conclude that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4. This is because the explanation that 2+2 actually equals 4, in reality, is extremely hard to vary. Nor can we think of a better explanation as to why 2+2=4.critical rationalist_{March 4, 2023
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@ETDA I wrote my comment offline and it appears to have scrambled the link. https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0681critical rationalist_{March 4, 2023
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Constructor theory might be revolutionary but what can you do with it? - Tim Andersen, Ph.D - 2021 Excerpt: 1 Physics already has ways to reconcile dynamics with possibility,, It’s called probability theory or, more specifically, statistical mechanics.,,, 2 Physics is mainly useful in as far as it can make predictions,, Constructor theory, so far, has not yielded much predictive ability.,,, 3 Constructor theory does not solve the problems it claims to solve Despite claims that it solves a number of problems in physics such as the connection between quantum and classical systems (hybrid systems) and irreversibility in thermodynamics, it isn’t clear that it solves any of these problems better than reductionist solutions that are more specific to those subfields.,, Conclusion Philosophically constructor theory is interesting because it points out that perhaps we are too focused on equations and should rely instead on more intuitive statements about the universe from which those equations derive. Perhaps that would help us steer clear of theories of everything that seem to be nothing but equations. Yet, constructor theory seems to be attempting to do what quantum non-equilibrium statistical theory is achieving. They are somewhat similar in that they are focused on state transitions, distributions of possible transitions, and less focused on initial conditions. But unlike constructor theory, that theory fits well within the traditional reductionist paradigm of initial conditions to which it reduces.,,, https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe/constructor-theory-may-not-be-the-science-revolution-it-claims-to-be-347ac51311e Tim Andersen, Ph.D. - Principal Research Scientist at Georgia Tech.
bornagain77_{March 4, 2023
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A book on constructor theory.
The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525521925?tag=edgeorg-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1 Seems more philosophical than physics.jerry_{March 4, 2023
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Your link to arxiv.org is broken (the one about the constructor theory).
Use this https://www.constructortheory.org/ and this https://www.edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marlettojerry_{March 4, 2023
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Since CR bashed Christianity:
“If you were to take Mohammed out of Islam, and Buddha out of Buddhism, and Confucius out of Confucianism you would still have a faith system that was relatively in tact. However, taking Christ out of Christianity sinks the whole faith completely. This is because Jesus centred the faith on himself. He said, “This is what it means to have eternal life: to know God the Father and Jesus Christ whom the Father sent” (John 17:3). “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). Buddha, before dying, said in effect, “I am still seeking for the truth.” Mohammed said in effect, “I point you to the truth.” Jesus said, “I am the truth.” Jesus claimed to not only give the truth, but to be the very personal embodiment of it.” http://commonground.co.za/?resources=is-jesus-the-only-way-to-god Keith Green's Incredible Testimony: (All other religions point to Jesus in one way or the other) "Jesus proved He is God!" - 1978 Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfzK6RGHe0M
bornagain77_{March 4, 2023
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CR @ 51, Your link to arxiv.org is broken (the one about the constructor theory).EDTA_{March 4, 2023
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it wanted us to know living things were designed it could have, well, designed the knowledge in the organisms of living things to contain the kind of knowledge that only people can create. Right?
Wrong! We have a new master of gobbledygook. Just about everything said is nonsense. The creator of the universe is immensely smart and immensely powerful. This creator has objectives because why is the universe created in a specific way? Maybe one of those objectives is uncertainty. Aside: There is no such thing as random. One just does not know the true origin of the force causing the effect. It’s too complicated to figure out. So we use the term random.jerry_{March 4, 2023
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Darwinism and epistemology,
Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself Nancy Pearcey - March 8, 2015 John Gray writes, “If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true,… the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.” What is the contradiction in that statement? Gray has essentially said, if Darwin’s theory is true, then it “serves evolutionary success, not truth.” In other words, if Darwin’s theory is true, then it is not true. Self-referential absurdity is akin to the well-known liar’s paradox: “This statement is a lie.” If the statement is true, then (as it says) it is not true, but a lie. Another example comes from Francis Crick. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes, “Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.” But that means Crick’s own theory is not a “scientific truth.” Applied to itself, the theory commits suicide. Of course, the sheer pressure to survive is likely to produce some correct ideas. A zebra that thinks lions are friendly will not live long. But false ideas may be useful for survival. Evolutionists admit as much: Eric Baum says, “Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Steven Pinker writes, “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false. To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion — and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value. So how can we know whether the theory of evolution itself is one of those false ideas? The theory undercuts itself. A few thinkers, to their credit, recognize the problem. Literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, “If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? … Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.” On a similar note, philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?” His answer is no: “I have to be able to believe … that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct — not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so.” Hence, “insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining.” https://evolutionnews.org/2015/03/why_evolutionar/
Teleology
“Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist; he dare not be seen with her in public but cannot live without her.” J. B. S. Haldane The ‘Mental Cell’: Let’s Loosen Up Biological Thinking! – Stephen L. Talbott – September 9, 2014 Excerpt: Many biologists are content to dismiss the problem with hand-waving: “When we wield the language of agency, we are speaking metaphorically, and we could just as well, if less conveniently, abandon the metaphors”. Yet no scientist or philosopher has shown how this shift of language could be effected. And the fact of the matter is just obvious: the biologist who is not investigating how the organism achieves something in a well-directed way is not yet doing biology, as opposed to physics or chemistry. Is this in turn just hand-waving? Let the reader inclined to think so take up a challenge: pose a single topic for biological research, doing so in language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness 1. One reason this cannot be done is clear enough: molecular biology — the discipline that was finally going to reduce life unreservedly to mindless mechanism — is now posing its own severe challenges. In this era of Big Data, the message from every side concerns previously unimagined complexity, incessant cross-talk and intertwining pathways, wildly unexpected genomic performances, dynamic conformational changes involving proteins and their cooperative or antagonistic binding partners, pervasive multifunctionality, intricately directed behavior somehow arising from the interaction of countless players in interpenetrating networks, and opposite effects by the same molecules in slightly different contexts. The picture at the molecular level begins to look as lively and organic — and thoughtful — as life itself. http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/org/comm/ar/2014/mental_cell_23.htm Metaphor and Meaning in the Teleological Language of Biology Annie L. Crawford – August 2020 Abstract: Excerpt: However, most discussions regarding the legitimacy of teleological language in biology fail to consider the nature of language itself. Since conceptual language is intrinsically metaphorical, teleological language can be dismissed as decorative if and only if it can be replaced with alternative metaphors without loss of essential meaning. I conclude that, since teleological concepts cannot be abstracted away from biological explanations without loss of meaning and explanatory power, life is inherently teleological. https://uncommondescent.com/philosophy/biologists-cant-stop-using-purpose-driven-language-because-life-really-is-designed/ teleological – adjective exhibiting or relating to design or purpose especially in nature https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/teleological
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continued
Right of Reply: Our Response to Jerry Coyne – September 29, 2019 by Günter Bechly, Brian Miller and David Berlinski Excerpt: Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak has shown that random searches in sequence space that start from known functional sequences are no more likely to enter regions in sequence space with new protein folds than searches that start from random sequences. The reason for this is clear: random searches are overwhelmingly more likely to go off into a non-folding, non-functional abyss than they are to find a novel protein fold. Why? Because such novel folds are so extraordinarily rare in sequence space. Moreover, as Meyer explained in Darwin’s Doubt, as mutations accumulate in functional sequences, they will inevitably destroy function long before they stumble across a new protein fold. Again, this follows from the extreme rarity (as well as the isolation) of protein folds in sequence space. Recent work by Weizmann Institute protein scientist Dan Tawfik has reinforced this conclusion. Tawfik’s work shows that as mutations to functional protein sequences accumulate, the folds of those proteins become progressively more thermodynamically and structurally unstable. Typically, 15 or fewer mutations will completely destroy the stability of known protein folds of average size. Yet, generating (or finding) a new protein fold requires far more amino acid sequence changes than that. Finally, calculations based on Tawfik’s work confirm and extend the applicability of Axe’s original measure of the rarity of protein folds. These calculations confirm that the measure of rarity that Axe determined for the protein he studied is actually representative of the rarity for large classes of other globular proteins. Not surprisingly, Dan Tawfik has described the origination of a truly novel protein or fold as “something like close to a miracle.” Tawfik is on Coyne’s side: He is mainstream. https://quillette.com/2019/09/29/right-of-reply-our-response-to-jerry-coyne/ Plant Galls and Evolution – Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig – 7 September 2017 How More than Twelve Thousand1 Ugly Facts are Slaying a Beautiful Hypothesis: Darwinism Excerpt: In short, entirely new organs (complex, refined, sophisticated, “high tech” galls), consisting of up to seven differentiated layers with diverse positive functions for the guests, are formed at the exclusive expense of the plant host, i. e. without any useful return by the animals (“fremddienliche Zweckmäßigkeit” (Erich Becher) – not easy to translate, but something like ‘extrinsic usefulness’, ‘disinterested suitability’, ‘well-directed extraneous utility’, closely akin to altruism; cf. p. 16). Now, Darwin formulated the following falsification criterium, among others, for his theory of natural selection – fully applicable to the modern neo-Darwinian versions of the theory as well, because: “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species; “… If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.” Also: “Natural selection can produce nothing in one species for the exclusive good or injury of another; though it may well produce parts, organs, and excretions highly useful or even indispensable, or again highly injurious to another species, but in all cases at the same time useful to the possessor.” Inference reached on the basis of the evidence: Because in the case of the galls, in thousands of plant species often entirely new organs have been formed for the exclusive good of more than 132,930 other species, these ‘ugly facts’ have annihilated Darwin’s theory as well as the modern versions of it. The galls are not ‘useful to the possessor’, the plants. There is no space for these phenomena in the world of “the selfish gene” (Dawkins). Moreover, the same conclusion appears to be true for thousands of angiosperm species producing deceptive flowers (in contrast to gall formations, now for the exclusive good of the plant species) – a topic which should be carefully treated in another paper. http://www.weloennig.de/PlantGalls.pdf
Consciousness,
The Hardest Problem in Science? October 28, 2011 Excerpt: ‘But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.’ - David Barash - Professor of Psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-hardest-problem-in-science/40845
Immaterial mathematics
Naturalism and Self-Refutation – Michael Egnor – January 31, 2018 Excerpt: Mathematics is certainly something we do. Is mathematics “included in the space-time continuum [with] basic elements … described by physics”?,,, What is the physics behind the Pythagorean theorem? After all, no actual triangle is perfect, and thus no actual triangle in nature has sides such that the Pythagorean theorem holds. There is no real triangle in which the sum of the squares of the sides exactly equals the square of the hypotenuse. That holds true for all of geometry. Geometry is about concepts, not about anything in the natural world or about anything that can be described by physics. What is the “physics” of the fact that the area of a circle is pi multiplied by the square of the radius? And of course what is natural and physical about imaginary numbers, infinite series, irrational numbers, and the mathematics of more than three spatial dimensions? Mathematics is entirely about concepts, which have no precise instantiation in nature,,, Furthermore, the very framework of Clark’s argument — logic — is neither material nor natural. Logic, after all, doesn’t exist “in the space-time continuum” and isn’t described by physics. What is the location of modus ponens? How much does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem weigh? What is the physics of non-contradiction? How many millimeters long is Clark’s argument for naturalism? Ironically the very logic that Clark employs to argue for naturalism is outside of any naturalistic frame. The strength of Clark’s defense of naturalism is that it is an attempt to present naturalism’s tenets clearly and logically. That is its weakness as well, because it exposes naturalism to scrutiny, and naturalism cannot withstand even minimal scrutiny. Even to define naturalism is to refute it. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/01/naturalism-and-self-refutation/
Darwinism undermines reliable observation,
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality – April 2016 The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions. Excerpt: “The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
Information is an immaterial entity that is physically distinct from matter and energy, and not reducible to matter and energy, as is presupposed within Darwinian thought:
First Teleportation Between Distant Atoms – 2009 Excerpt: For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing. Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances. Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance https://jqi.umd.edu/news/first-teleportation-between-distant-atoms Quantum Teleportation Enters the Real World – September 19, 2016 Excerpt: Two separate teams of scientists have taken quantum teleportation from the lab into the real world. Researchers working in Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China, used existing fiber optics networks to transmit small units of information across cities via quantum entanglement — Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”,,, This isn’t teleportation in the “Star Trek” sense — the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,, ,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another. https://www.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/09/19/quantum-teleportation-enters-real-world/#.V-HqWNEoDtR
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CR, contrary to what Darwinists believe, repeating lies does not make them true. Since mutations to DNA are now known, in the vast majority of instance, to not be truly random, but to be 'directed'. Darwinists will often respond to this (very) inconvenient falsification of a core presupposition of their theory by claiming that mutations are only held to be random with regard to fitness, i.e. to the needs of the individual, (as if that claim gets them out of the severe jam they have with this core falsification to their theory), but even their claim that mutations are only held to be random with regard to fitness, i.e. to the needs of the individual, is now known to be a false claim in and of itself.
(False) Prediction of Darwinism – Mutations are not adaptive – Cornelius Hunter In the twentieth century, the theory of evolution predicted that mutations are not adaptive or directed. In other words, mutations were believed to be random with respect to the needs of the individual. As Julian Huxley put it, “Mutation merely provides the raw material of evolution; it is a random affair, and takes place in all directions. … in all cases they are random in relation to evolution. Their effects are not related to the needs of the organisms.” (Huxley, 36) Or as Jacques Monod explained: “chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.” (Monod, 112) Ronald Fisher wrote that mutations are “random with respect to the organism’s need” (Orr). This fundamental prediction persisted for decades as a recent paper explained: “mutation is assumed to create heritable variation that is random and undirected.” (Chen, Lowenfeld and Cullis) But that assumption is now known to be false. The first problem is that the mutation rate is adaptive. For instance, when a population of bacteria is subjected to harsh conditions it tends to increase its mutation rate. It is as though a signal has been sent saying, “It is time to adapt.” Also, a small fraction of the population increases its mutation rates even higher yet. These hypermutators ensure that an even greater variety of adaptive change is explored. (Foster) Experiments have also discovered that duplicated DNA segments may be subject to higher mutation rates. Since the segment is a duplicate it is less important to preserve and, like a test bed, appears to be used to experiment with new designs. (Wright) The second problem is that organisms use strategies to direct the mutations according to the threat. Adaptive mutations have been extensively studied in bacteria. Experiments typically alter the bacteria food supply or apply some other environmental stress causing mutations that target the specific environmental stress. (Burkala, et. al.; Moxon, et. al; Wright) Adaptive mutations have also been observed in yeast (Fidalgo, et. al.; David, et. al.) and flax plants. (Johnson, Moss and Cullis) One experiment found repeatable mutations in flax in response to fertilizer levels. (Chen, Schneeberger and Cullis) Another exposed the flax to four different growth conditions and found that environmental stress can induce mutations that result in “sizeable, rapid, adaptive evolutionary responses.” (Chen, Lowenfeld and Cullis) In response to this failed prediction some evolutionists now are saying that evolution somehow created the mechanisms that cause mutations to be adaptive. https://sites.google.com/site/darwinspredictions/mutations-are-not-adaptive
As to natural selection,
The waiting time problem in a model hominin population – 2015 Sep 17 John Sanford, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith, and John Baumgardner Excerpt: The program Mendel’s Accountant realistically simulates the mutation/selection process,,, Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5 % [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information. While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man. It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. If that were true, then the waiting time problem would only be meaningful within small populations. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns (Table 4 and Fig. 4). When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573302/
Body plans,
Response to John Wise – October 2010 Excerpt: But there are solid empirical grounds for arguing that changes in DNA alone cannot produce new organs or body plans. A technique called “saturation mutagenesis”1,2 has been used to produce every possible developmental mutation in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster),3,4,5 roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans),6,7 and zebrafish (Danio rerio),8,9,10 and the same technique is now being applied to mice (Mus musculus).11,12. None of the evidence from these and numerous other studies of developmental mutations supports the neo-Darwinian dogma that DNA mutations can lead to new organs or body plans–,,, (As Jonathan Wells states),,, We can modify the DNA of a fruit fly embryo in any way we want, and there are only three possible outcomes: A normal fruit fly; A defective fruit fly; or A dead fruit fly. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/10/response_to_john_wise038811.html
Fisher’s Theorem
Geneticist Corrects Fisher’s Theorem, but the Correction Turns Natural Selection Upside Down – December 22, 2017 | David F. Coppedge A new paper corrects errors in Fisher’s Theorem, a mathematical “proof” of Darwinism. Rather than supporting evolution, the corrected theorem inverts it. Excerpt: The authors of the new paper describe the fundamental problems with Fisher’s theorem. They then use Fisher’s first principles, and reformulate and correct the theorem. They have named the corrected theorem The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations. The correction of the theorem is not a trivial change – it literally flips the theorem on its head. The resulting conclusions are clearly in direct opposition to what Fisher had originally intended to prove.,,, The authors of the new paper realized that one of Fisher’s pivotal assumptions was clearly false, and in fact was falsified many decades ago. In his informal corollary, Fisher essentially assumed that new mutations arose with a nearly normal distribution – with an equal proportion of good and bad mutations (so mutations would have a net fitness effect of zero). We now know that the vast majority of mutations in the functional genome are harmful, and that beneficial mutations are vanishingly rare. The simple fact that Fisher’s premise was wrong, falsifies Fisher’s corollary. Without Fisher’s corollary – Fisher’s Theorem proves only that selection improves a population’s fitness until selection exhausts the initial genetic variation, at which point selective progress ceases. Apart from his corollary, Fisher’s Theorem only shows that within an initial population with variant genetic alleles, there is limited selective progress followed by terminal stasis.,,, The authors observe that the more realistic the parameters, the more likely fitness decline becomes. https://crev.info/2017/12/geneticist-corrects-fishers-theorem/
Fossil record,
Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head – July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: “This pattern, known as ‘early high disparity’, turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn’t a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.”,,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: “Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: “A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig
Lönnig on Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery” Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig - January 10, 2022 Excerpt: All orders and families of the angiosperms appear abruptly in the fossil record (the same for most lower systematic categories). The statement of distinguished paleontologist Otto H. Schindewolf (University of Tübingen) of 1965 has definitely been further corroborated by paleobotany and is all the more evidently true now (see also Eldedge et al. 2005 and discussion in Lönnig 2018, 20193; see also Bechly 20214). "According to the Darwinian concept, minor racial differences are to be gradually increased to become species traits, and then, by adding more and more small alterations, become generic, family differences, etc. The variety of forms would then increase towards the end of the individual phyla, and there would be the greatest abundance of orders, families and genera, that is to say, differences of a higher degree. The opposite is the case. A new Bauplan (body plan) of the systematic range of a class or order usually appears absolutely abruptly in the fossil record, without long rows/successions of links that would show us a gradual formation from another order forming its root."5 And, what is more, living fossils are not the exception — as they are usually portrayed in the biological literature — but the rule for a large part of plant and animal families: We are literally surrounded by living fossils: Angiosperms, mammals, birds, and many other organisms. Moreover: “Living fossils are something of an embarrassment to the expectation that evolutionary change is inevitable as time goes by” (Eldredge). https://evolutionnews.org/2022/01/abstract-lonnig-on-darwins-abominable-mystery/
Convergent evolution,
Extinct Four-Eyed Monitor Lizard Busts Myth of a Congruent Nested Hierarchy – Günter Bechly – April 23, 2018 Excerpt: One of the most essential doctrines of Darwinian evolution, apart from universal common descent with modification, is the notion that complex similarities indicate homology and are ordered in a congruent nested pattern that facilitates the hierarchical classification of life. When this pattern is disrupted by incongruent evidence, such conflicting evidence is readily explained away as homoplasies with ad hoc explanations like underlying apomorphies (parallelisms), secondary reductions, evolutionary convergences, long branch attraction, and incomplete lineage sorting. When I studied in the 1980s at the University of Tübingen, where the founder of phylogenetic systematics, Professor Willi Hennig, was teaching a first generation of cladists, we still all thought that such homoplasies are the exceptions to the rule, usually restricted to simple or poorly known characters. Since then the situation has profoundly changed. Homoplasy is now recognized as a ubiquitous phenomenon (e.g., eyes evolved 45 times independently, and bioluminiscence 27 times; hundreds of more examples can be found at Cambridge University’s “Map of Life” website).,,, ,,, We can safely conclude: it is an epic myth, willingly perpetuated by evolutionary biologists, that the similarities between organisms mostly fall in a hierarchic pattern of nested groups and thus suggest common ancestry and indicate phylogenetic relationship. In reality this claim is contradicted by a flood of incongruences and reticulate patterns that shed doubt on fundamental paradigms of evolutionary biology like the notions of homology and common descent. This inconvenient conflicting evidence is explained away with a pile of ad hoc hypotheses, correlated with more and more contrived and implausible evolutionary scenarios. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/04/extinct-four-eyed-monitor-lizard-busts-myth-of-a-congruent-nested-hierarchy/
bornagain77_{March 4, 2023
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PM1, I have suggested that while there are clearly self evident and otherwise infallible and knowable certain truths [try to deny 3 + 2 = 5 or that error exists etc], most of the time we use knowledge in a weaker sense. That is, warranted, credibly true (so, reliable) beliefs, which we are persuaded of and feel comfortable acting on, or would even be irresponsible not to act on . . . and yes, Ciceronian first duties lie down that road. Science, History, Management decision making and a lot of common sense day to day life lie in this realm. KF PS, I have been impressed by Dallas Willard (and heirs), but notice my adjustment:
To have knowledge in the dispositional sense—where you know things you are not necessarily thinking about at the time—is to be able to represent something as it is on an adequate basis of thought or experience, not to exclude communications from qualified sources (“authority”). This is the “knowledge” of ordinary life, and it is what you expect of your electrician, auto mechanic, math teacher, and physician. Knowledge is not rare, and it is not esoteric . . . no satisfactory general description of “an adequate basis of thought or experience” has ever been achieved. We are nevertheless able to determine in many specific types of cases that such a basis is or is not present [p.19] . . . . Knowledge, but not mere belief or feeling, generally confers the right to act and to direct action, or even to form and supervise policy. [p. 20] In any area of human activity, knowledge brings certain advantages. Special considerations aside, knowledge authorizes one to act, to direct action, to develop and supervise policy, and to teach. It does so because, as everyone assumes, it enables us to deal more successfully with reality: with what we can count on, have to deal with, or are apt to have bruising encounters with. Knowledge involves ~~assured~~ [--> warranted, credible] truth, and truth in our representations and beliefs is very like accuracy in the sighting mechanism on a gun. If the mechanism is accurately aligned—is “true,” it enables those who use it with care to hit an intended target. [p. 4, Dallas Willard & Literary Heirs, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Routledge|Taylor& Francis Group, 2018. ]
kairosfocus_{March 4, 2023
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CR at 51, Another one who wants God to appear to him on demand. "• The Church “proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.” '• “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.” '• Quoting our late Holy Father John Paul II: “The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality, which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.” ' "Christoph Cardinal Schönborn is archbishop of Vienna and general editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church."relatd_{March 4, 2023
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CR at 49, God works infallibly in Creation. From Communion and Stewardship: Part 69: "... But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles....It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).'relatd_{March 4, 2023
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01. Mutations are not random. Already addressed. They are random to any problem to be solved. Again, this is old hat. The use of the term “directed” is equivocation. 02. Natural Selection is poor design substitute. Yes, the natural process of evolution is a poor design substitute, as I’ve already explained. Designers create explanatory knowledge, which has significant reach. Evolution does not. It creates non-explanatory knowledge, which has limited reach. Only people can create explanatory knowledge. However, the genome contains, you guessed it, non-explanatory knowledge, not explanatory knowledge. Ask yourself, why did the designer intentionally decide to obscure its involvement by only creating the kind of knowledge that natural processes could create? If it wanted us to know living things were designed it could have, well, designed the knowledge in the organisms of living things to contain the kind of knowledge that only people can create. Right? Why would a designer do this? Is it trying to hide its involvement? Also, the probably calculations you reference assume the outcomes in question were intentional targets picked from the very start. This isn’t part of evolutionary theory. It’s a hidden ID assumption that is smuggled into this kind of argument. Again, see the video regarding probability in science. You haven’t responded to it at all. 03. DNA and body plans With a person has six fingers due to a genetic mutation, does their DNA contain an entire extra copy of an entire finger? No, it doesn’t. This doesn’t help your argument as a small change can have a large impact on body plans. You seem to keep referencing papers and ideas that you seem to think help your position, but actually do not. This doesn't bode well for your understanding of either the references or the subject at hand. 04. Fisher’s Theorem in population genetics This is more of “Darwin thought”, except in the context of “Fisher thought”. Had either of them being found wrong does not falsify Neo-darwinism. This is a non-sequitur. After all, Einstein had mistaken ideas about several aspects of fundamental physics, including an expanding universe, black holes, gravity waves, etc. Yet, we don’t hear you complaining about how GR has been falsified because Einstein was wrong about those things. What gives, BA? Where is the equal outrage? You have no outrage because it doesn’t suit your purpose. Neo-Darwinism is just an unfortunate theory that happens to convict with one of your religious beliefs. 04. What “Darwin thought” about the fossil record Already addressed. Ignoring this, you don’t seem to have any problems with varying rates of inflation in the expansion of the universe. So why do you have a problem with varying rates of mutation in evolution? Because varying rates of inflation suits your purpose in the form of the Big Bang. See above. 05. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Lönnig’s conclusions about the results of multiple experiments are, to put in mildly, heavily contested and considered misinterpretations. But this isn’t anything new, either. You're grasping at straws. 06. Darwin’s theory, due to the randomness postulate… Another “Darwin thought” non-sequitur. What about what Einstein thought, etc? Where is your outrage in the case of GR? 07, 08. “Darwin thought” about the beneficial features and irreducible complexity. Another “Darwin thought” non-sequitur. And, like the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum? 09. “Darwin thought” about consciousness. Another non-sequitur. Neo-Darwinism is about biological complexity, not consciousness. But you already know this as well. Again, what gives, BA? 10. Mathematics and the impossibility of Neo-darwninism. See the constructor theory of evolution, which specifically addresses this criticism. Specifically, it asks: since biological replicators operate at such hi-fidelity, did the design of replicators have to be present, at the outset, in the laws of physics?
To this end I apply Constructor Theory's new mode of explanation to provide an exact formulation of the appearance of design, of no-design laws, and of the logic of self-reproduction and natural selection, within fundamental physics. I conclude that self-reproduction, replication and natural selection are possible under no-design laws, the only non-trivial condition being that they allow digital information to be physically instantiated. This has an exact characterisation in the constructor theory of information. I also show that under no-design laws an accurate replicator requires the existence of a "vehicle" constituting, together with the replicator, a self-reproducer.
If the answer to this question is “No.” then why would the design of replicators need to be present in some designer, at the outset? Do you have any criticism of this paper BA? 11. The scientific method itself is based on reliable observation. Which is a mistaken theory of epistemology. Your point is? 12. Information is immaterial. We can bring information into fundamental physics using constructor theory. See this paper. You haven’t responded to this in the least. If specific physical tasks must be possible for information, then how can information be completely independent of physical systems? Again, you’ll completely ignore this reference as it doesn’t suit your purpose. But, by all means, explain it to us, BA. I won’t be holding my breath. 13. Darwinism and epistemology. This whole line of argument appeals to the idea that knowledge is justified true belief. That’s yet another example of a mistaken epistemology. 14. Darwinism and teleology I think teleology exists. I just don’t think it was involved in created the knowledge in living things. They contain non-explanatory knowledge, not explanatory knowledge. Again, only people can create explanatory knowledge. This is because they intentionally attempt to conjecture explanatory theories of how to solve problems, then criticize them. The result has significant reach. Yet, the knowledge in the genomes of living things do not contain explanatory knowledge. What gives? Again, you should download latest version of physics-materialism.exe, as your’s is woefully out of date. But, of course, you won’t because, well, it doesn’t suit your purpose.critical rationalist_{March 4, 2023
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@48
What does fallibilism say about self-evident truths such as A=A, 2+2=4, error exists, truth exists, I exist?
I'd be interested to hear how Critical Rationalist responds. Certainly one option would be to say that fallibilism does not apply to analytic statements. But that would commit a fallibilist to the analytic/synthetic distinction, which became controversial in 20th century philosophy thanks to Morton White and W. V. O. Quine. Then there is the question as to what we ought to be fallibilists about. A standard answer is "theories". But this invites the nice question as to whether there's an unambiguous distinction between a scientific theory and our everyday conceptual frameworks. Perhaps a fallibilist would be willing to say that a conceptual system as a whole can be mistaken, regardless of what is logically entailed by that system. Should we be fallibilists about arithmetic? Could we be? Could we even conceive of an experience which shows that arithmetic should be replaced with a different conceptual system? I cannot conceive of a situation that could lead people to decide that arithmetic should be abandoned, but perhaps that is a failure of my own imagination.PyrrhoManiac1_{March 4, 2023
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The Christian God has revealed Himself in Scripture.
Origenes, how have you infallibly identified the Bible as an infallible source of the Christian God, or any God? Or is that a tautology, in that the Christian God is just whatever the Bible says God it is. But many other holy books claim to say God is like X, etc. Assuming you somehow managed to achieve this, how have you managed to infallibly interpret the Bible? And, if you've somehow managed to achieve that, how have you infallibly determined when to defer to the Bible? After all, the Bible supposedly is not a science book. Which means we shouldn't defer to it on matters of science. But how do you know it also is not a book on how God actually is, what he actually did, etc., either? So we shouldn't defer to it on matters of God's actual existence? Rather, it could be a book we should defer to on matters of what the people who wrote it thought God would be like if he existed. Or if rejected their preferred explanation of how they think God would have acted behind the scenes, had he existed. That the Bible is actually about how things really are, instead of how they wanted things to be, depends on how and when we should defer to it. Right? IOW, any infallibly in a supposedly infallible source cannot help us before our fallible human reasoning and problem solving has had its say. Which is effectively the same as someone who didn't believing in the infallibility of the source. In both cases, the weakest link in the chain, is fallible human reasoning and problem solving.critical rationalist_{March 4, 2023
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